DTel: Woman to lose home after loan for kitchen soars

who forced her to sign?

So at the time when she was divorced and struggling financially, she still thought it was OK to spend 11k to get different cupboards and worktops to the ones she already had?

The female way of coping?

Retail therapy?

Yeah. At that rate the loan amount will double every 2 years 9 months.

She made a bad decision.

Whether the loan company is culpable for leaving her with too little to survive on after repayments is another issue.

Daytona

"Sufaud" wrote

So, we are pretty safe to say that she had been living there for less than 6 years at the time she got the new kitchen. She has had the benefit of the new kitchen for at least 75% (and possibly up to 90%) of the time she has lived there...

I'm sure there will be more of these cases after the recent TV exposure. "I was too thick to understand I was paying over the odds.", honest guv.

Are we? All we can tell is that she had probably been living there for more than 3 years. But of what relevance is any of this to the price of eggs? The house and its original kitchen could have been pretty old at the time. It might well have been ghastly enough to justify renewing.

I'm not sure what point you're trying to make.

Mind you, £10,800 was a lot of money in 1987 to be spending on a kitchen if you have to borrow the money. No-one sane would borrow that much at so high a rate unless they were hoodwinked into it, would they? If you can't get that sort of money at mortgage rates, it's not a good idea to borrow that much. She should have made do with a cheaper new kitchen, if indeed a new kitchen was essential.

Good point. I make it ~£19 grands worth in todays money. She can FOAD AFAIC.

Daytona

If it worked, then it wasnt 'essential', and for someone who was "financially struggling" it was a Stuuupid thing to do to spend anywhere near that much money. We put a new kitchen in around that time, cost 1/2 that much and we werent particularly strapped for cash. One dumb bitch.

The firm is well known to poverty workers and Citizens Advice Bureaux as enticing homeowners to borrow, then hitting them with very high fees on arrearages, then seizing their homes.

They're not the only one. And the scam exists in the USA too. Lots of times the home repeirs are faulty or shoddy or incomplete or the builder goes bust or disappears, but the loan lives on. Like those student loans, they get sold on and there's nobody to complain to when the course proves to be useless or the school shuts its doors before you finish.

One persons 'enticing'...is another persons 'asking'...a person who is struggling financially shouldnt even think about spending c20k (in todays money) on a kitchen. But its always someone else's fault, isnt it?

In message , Ronald Raygun writes

Trouble is, I bet she didnt subscribe to this newsgroup, just like the other 99.9999% of the population. Of the remainder, only about .4% understand the concept of interest, and only abut 20% of them understand the maths.

She wanted a New Kitchen. What else did she need to know?

The fruits of Thatcherism...

ews/2004/11/24/nloan24.xml

No, the fruits of stupidity.

So she's broke and she takes out a loan at 29.3% FOR A NEW KITCHEN? Jesus, she ought to be horsewhipped, not pitied.

Always? That's your perversion.

Truth in advertising is a worthy goal. Fraud is a crime. Where this one sits, I can't say.

I know I bought a kitchen from Magnet and it was rubbish, but I had to pay anyway, and they never made good. I had to bring in a new crew to fix it. Fortunately I am rich. What the hell do the poor do?

"Ronald Raygun" wrote

I'd guess so, yes.

"Ronald Raygun" wrote

If she had been living there for, let's say, 15 years in 1987 - don't you think that the line above would say "where she has lived for more than

"Ronald Raygun" wrote

I'd have thought that "eggs" & "kitchens" were highly relevant to each other!

But seriously - it just appeared to me that the only reason the figure of 20 years was included, was to make it seem like she'd been there for "ages". When in fact, she'd likely been there for less than 6 years (when she got the kitchen & took out the loan).

She needed to know the value of the monthly payments (which she did know) and that she had to make those monthly payments (which she did know). What is so difficult about that? Her problem was not caused by the loan per se but by her failure to make the scheduled payments.

She would have to be very stupid indeed to believe that she could agree to a loan, fail to make payments but expect the loan to be paid off.

It doesn't have to be anyone's fault, although offering a loan at a teaser interest rate with kickers that impose huge late fees ... when the borrower gets sick, divorces, loses her job, retires, etc. are deceptive.

The nastiest lenders deliberately seek to seize the borrower's house, bidding at the auction exactly the amount of the debt, not the value of the house. That works if the house is of a kind not easily sold at auction, or the auction sale is on the courthouse steps without advertising. How did the debt get to be so high if the lender didn't forebear until the fees quintupled it?